When comparing Dishonored vs Age of Empires II HD, the Slant community recommends Age of Empires II HD for most people. In the question“What are the best singleplayer games on Steam?”Age of Empires II HD is ranked 29th while Dishonored is ranked 55th. The most important reason people chose Age of Empires II HD is:

While the graphics are slightly outdated, they were very well done for their time. And when combined with the history behind the game and its wonderful soundtrack, the game comes across as extremely polished.

Pros

Pro

The world (and difficulty) changes based on your actions

Depending on player action, the world can change in drastic ways. A violent player will find that disease-carrying rats will multiply in number depending on the number of people killed, while a pacifist player who eliminates enemies with nonlethal options may will find the world easier to explore.

Pro

Non-lethal options aren't always better

One weakness of most stealth games is that it's almost always better to play nonlethally. In Dishonored, choosing the nonlethal option on an assassination target is often a fate worse than death. For instance, one woman can be delivered to her secret stalker, the overseer of the anti-magic church can be branded as a heretic and punished by the church, and a pair of brothers can be sent to slave in the mines they once owned.

Pro

Awesome ambiance with a great finish

While the graphics are slightly outdated, they were very well done for their time. And when combined with the history behind the game and its wonderful soundtrack, the game comes across as extremely polished.

Pro

Facilitates the user's preferred pace

This game neither gives the impression of being thrown to the wolves nor that of being left stranded on an island. Whether you want to move slowly and steadily through the game or take things at a more heightened pace, Age of Empires 2 will allow for both (given a little planning).

Pro

Runs on very old computers

As this game is quite old, requiring only a 1.2GHZ processor and 1 Gigabyte of RAM, this title will run on older PC's and laptops alike without issue.

Cons

Con

It doesn't rely on sound or light as a means of stealth

Dishonored clearly borrows a lot of elements from Thief, but sadly, not its ancestor's most important traits. Where Thief cared about the materials you walked on, and had guards that would vocalize constantly to let players know where they were, Dishonored merely relies on whether or not a player is running (loud mode) or crouch-walking (quiet mode), and it feels less satisfying than Thief. Likewise, stealth is based primarily on line of sight in Dishonored, whereas Thief considered light and dark as well; a player cloaked in shadow could not be seen, even if he was standing directly in front of his target.

Con

Taking down targets can feel unsatisfying

While the build up to getting to a target is great, talking them down does not always feel satisfying. Thankfully, this option is rarely available. While it does not ruin the game, it would be nice if conversations felt more fulfilling than this.

Con

Age of Empires II HD is an unsuccessful remaster due to its outdated graphics

With the only notable upgrade being high resolution options, Age of Empires II HD fails at being a proper remaster. While higher resolutions give the game a slight face lift, the rest of the engine is left largely unchanged. This means the graphics we see in this remaster are nearly the same in its original 1999 release. Due to this, the game is grating to the eye and does not deliver on its high definition promise.

Con

A lack of proper User Interface scaling makes a clunky UI worse

While this is a remastered edition of a classic Real-Time Strategy title, the UI was left largely unchanged. Selecting workers still prompts you to click buttons to bring up both economic and military buildings, then choosing whichever building you wish to construct. This is uninteresting design and makes the UI difficult to navigate.

On top of this, the game does not feature UI scaling. Since the game is bound to your current desktop display settings, the UI will adjust itself to match that resolution. This means if you play at 4K resolution the User Interface will be absurdly small, making it near impossible to see what buildings you wish to construct or what units you want to train. This is counter-intuitive design, for this era of modern gaming, and makes properly playing the game more of a hassle than it should ever be.